Rebooting with steel toes and bigger words

The new blog is here.

 

.

Update

Posting music here now.

And trying really hard to not leave tons of comments on other people’s blogs (one’s already been deleted — I guess I’m too cranky for some).

This new site courtesy of DJ TomElko.

An end post from an O.B. (Original Blogger)

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This Strib widget (think of it as a cyber zombie if you like) will automatically shuffle back and forth from here to the Stribyard to get the latest recount numbers. [Yeah, I suspected that widget wouldn't fucking work.]

Enjoy. I know I have. And if you’re at all O/C, the Strib’s last article has 536 comments (as of this morning).

—•—

It’s going to be Jerry Brown v Ken Starr in the Prop Hate court battle. That should be fun. 

—•—

Spotty threatened to quit yesterday, but is with us still. Tild, as usual, is on semi-hiatus. WINston notes that Lithuania has left the Coalition of the Easily Bribed. REW is still running a daycare at her blog, so I can’t link to her without violating the court order. Helmut is still doing intermittent fruit blogging with the occasional nunchuck ping pong game thrown in for good measure.

Vick’s got  yet another one of his year end book lists, and as usual, I’ve read none of them. Something about reading several newspapers and over a hundred blogs a day sort kills your desire to curl up with a good book at night.

Charlieq’s blog is four years old today. I’ve got that beat by five years, this blog having first launched on December 20, 1999. The links are mostly broken by now, so I think we can get by with just some pictures:

Crudely put together with no recourse to blogging software (Dave Winer being too much the Windows guy). Music reviews, sports, politics, weather — yes, it was a Bizarro world version of a newspaper, complete with obits. Lots of obits:

No clue why so many other than it was the end of the century and I guess I was obsessed with listing them that didn’t make it to the new one. Still, it makes it easier to tie the birth of this blog into its demise. I’ve gone from DeForest Kelley cashing out to Majel Barrett Rodenberry’s passing, from Iron Eyes Cody to Odetta, from Señor Wences to Dock Ellis. The circle is complete.

I updated this original blog thing a few times and then I killed it because I couldn’t get anyone to read it, my friends being far too caught up in the exciting dial-up game of waiting for the newspaper to load. 

Thanks to broadband, things are different now. Instead of waiting on the news, we wait on the images from the ad server to load so we can eventually see which wire items the local daily newspapers went with this morning.

Back in ‘99 I wasn’t even thinking about filesharing, that being a virusy thing I was a bit apprehensive about. Now I find that among other things, this blog has outlived RIAA suits against folks like me. [h/t Ripley] 

Back in ‘99 I was still bowling.

Too chatty, a freudian birth/berth misspelling, and in future incarnations I made it a point to lie a lot when writing about myself. More entertaining that way, and much less self-incriminating.

In lieu of a restaurant review (I was between PR gigs with Taste of Thailand and True Thai), I wrote about my Thanksgiving (and yes, rereading the items it seems more likely The Mississippifarian actually launched in November, but the only file I have left is dated Dec. 20, 1999, so today is the arbitrary anniversary).

I even shared some details from my medical files.

As you can see, the cussing isn’t a new thing with me. It being 1999 and all, I even had to explain what it was that I was doing.

Why indeed? Then again it turned out not to be burn out so much as bad scrip (Zoloft sucking juice out of my pomegranates). I even had a blogroll back then, and no, you’re not on it.

Sources more than anything. In 1999 it wasn’t like everyone was online. Links to hot new sites like Arts & Letters Daily actually got passed around, Google still being a new thing and still trying to cover what was already out there and not the ubiquitous resource it is today.

For me, blogging was a respite from resume writing, and yes, I wrote an item about that, as well.

I’d forgotten about those parakeets. NEVER give critters as a gift. I eventually talked an Ethiopian client into taking the birds off my hands and they died after several years of being alternately tortured and admired by two young girls in Apple Valley.

It was a different time. Same place, same me, but everything was a little fresher, a little less fuckyou. Then again I was still using a “wild card” email address that let me make up working email addresses on the fly, and the original email address for this blog was . . . you guessed it:

I’m sure I had some other thoughts to share, other folks to mention, but in true blogging tradition I’m just blowing this post out my ass in real time as I sit here finishing off my morning coffee. Errands to run now, so here’s a final “list”:

rainbow carrots

red jalapenos

cut flowers

sweet mangoes

fragrant pears

And that’s what’s getting me out the door so I can joyfully trudge my way through the new snow. That’s been the routine ever since Norwegianity/The Mississippifarian started up, and there’s no reason to change any of that now.

I will update this blog with a new URL if and when I start doing a new blog. No clue as to that as today is about quitting, to be followed by R&R, to be followed by maybe something else. Later will tell.

Thanks for checking in and good luck finding a new blog that completes your inner you like I used to. Who knows? Maybe if there had been more reacharounds….

—•—

Dock Ellis, R.I.P.p.e.d.

 

 

Final Friday 10

Thought I’d bring nonsequitur musicality back for old timey sakes, and no, this set is in no way random:

Download the zipped set at Rapidshare and listen to the tunes in the order indicated.

This is my final commandment for you:

Take, listen, this is my hobby. Drink from it all of you for these are from the soundtrack for the End Times, given and uploaded for you for the remission of your political sins. Do this in remembrance of me.

So endeth the penultimate portion of this blog.

 

UPDATE: A .pdf collection of MissMasts can be found here.

Penultimate posting prevents premature blog R.I.P.itude

How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?

The financial services industry has claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income over the past generation, making the people who run the industry incredibly rich. Yet, at this point, it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it. And it’s not just a matter of money: the vast riches achieved by those who managed other people’s money have had a corrupting effect on our society as a whole.

Let’s start with those paychecks. Last year, the average salary of employees in “securities, commodity contracts, and investments” was more than four times the average salary in the rest of the economy. Earning a million dollars was nothing special, and even incomes of $20 million or more were fairly common. The incomes of the richest Americans have exploded over the past generation, even as wages of ordinary workers have stagnated; high pay on Wall Street was a major cause of that divergence.

But surely those financial superstars must have been earning their millions, right? No, not necessarily. The pay system on Wall Street lavishly rewards the appearance of profit, even if that appearance later turns out to have been an illusion.

Consider the hypothetical example of a money manager who leverages up his clients’ money with lots of debt, then invests the bulked-up total in high-yielding but risky assets, such as dubious mortgage-backed securities. For a while — say, as long as a housing bubble continues to inflate — he (it’s almost always a he) will make big profits and receive big bonuses. Then, when the bubble bursts and his investments turn into toxic waste, his investors will lose big — but he’ll keep those bonuses.

O.K., maybe my example wasn’t hypothetical after all….

 

In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s G.D.P., up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing — and it probably was — we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.

But the costs of America’s Ponzi era surely went beyond the direct waste of dollars and cents.

At the crudest level, Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains corrupted and continue to corrupt politics, in a nicely bipartisan way. From Bush administration officials like Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who looked the other way as evidence of financial fraud mounted, to Democrats who still haven’t closed the outrageous tax loophole that benefits executives at hedge funds and private equity firms (hello, Senator Schumer), politicians have walked when money talked.

Meanwhile, how much has our nation’s future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?

Most of all, the vast riches being earned — or maybe that should be “earned” — in our bloated financial industry undermined our sense of reality and degraded our judgment….

What we’re looking at now are the consequences of a world gone Madoff.

Paul Krugman 

This is what burned me out on resume writing. Inequitable compensation has been a growing problem for decades and under Bush the relationship between compensation and the value of the work being performed all but disappeared. It’s been all about leverage and the powerful taking far more than their fair share (when, in fact, they deserved any part of the pie at all).

The NYTimes editorial board is, of course, more concerned with investors’ losses than executive greed.

Mr. Madoff’s suspected multibillion-dollar fraud, discovered as falling markets exposed the fiction of its 10 percent annual profits, provided a stark reminder of how greed impairs judgment, duping some of the world’s supposedly savviest investors for decades. It raises once more a fundamental question of these times: Where were the regulators when all of this was happening?

Where indeed? How can all of this be put back together without anyone going to prison? Well, stick around and I’m sure you’ll find out. Already some belated reporting has discovered the 1997 tax break that helped create the housing bubble. 

Who knows what our intrepid journalists will find if only their publishers finally turn them loose?

—-—

Recounting the good times:

WaPost

MnSupremes

Paul Demko

Jay Weiner

David Brauer

“Thank you for counting my vote”

Chris Steller

Bob Collins

And, just now, for the very first time (according to the Strib:

—-—

iDrunk?

—-—

Andy Birkey has more on Obama and Rick Warren. 

Am I the only person who thinks the “gay” response echoes fundies freaking out over gays?

As John Cole speculated, this honor for Warren elevates him above the loathesome Dobsons and Robertsons, but I suspect Obama’s getting more out of this than that. 

The point of this election wasn’t to lord it over the conservatives like they did to us. The whole point of Obamaism is to convert the heathens, and he seems to be on track to do just that.

Prog nation is coming, but not until we’re actually a progressive nation, and not just the place that finally elected a non-piece of shit to the presidency.

—-—

R.I.P.s a plenty:

Majel Barrett Roddenberry (I had the original NBC promo poster on my wall in high school)

W. Mark Felt

Paul Weyrich

Dave Smith

The new rules

Everyone is writing about how the media’s screwing Obama to the wall over Blagojevich despite there not being anything tying the two men together other than Blagojevich calling Obama a motherfucker. [A sundry list of journalists behaving badly can be found at Media Matters' County Fair.]

Every other liberal blogger is calling this the revival of the Clinton rules in which the media dogs the President day and night in an effort to manufacture or inflate controversy. You know, all the shit they used to do before Bush got elected.

Well here are my new rules. Whenever a media whore like Dana Milbank or Steve Chapman is on a show that has an actual studio audience (like The Daily Show), each bloviating lie should be met with a chorus of thrown shoes. 

Let’s see how long these motherfuckers dish out their snark when they know they’ll be greeted with thrown oxfords and hurled pumps each time they appear before a studio audience. But no fuckme shoes. Media whores aren’t worthy.

And, if you have a pair of die scum die! stiletto heels, save ‘em for when a Goldman Sachs execu-whore or a Chrysler exec is on.

—.—

Kos on The UpTake’s recount coverage. 

I left a comment, and no, it wasn’t at all gracious. Kos seems to think Al’s ahead, but the Strib still has him down by 96 votes. Still, that’s much better than yesterday, and probably not as good as it will be by day’s end.

Kos also wrote on the recount earlier today in a link-laden post.

—.—

Phoenix Woman writes about the “other” pastor who will give the benediction at Obama’s inauguration.

And Andy Birkey has a good write up on Obama’s Transportation pick. (Mick is somewhat less than fully amused but I stand by Obama because I do think there is a method to all this madness, Caroline Kennedy in the Senate excepted.)

—.—

Blows against the empire:

“Demands for war crimes prosecutions are now growing in the mainstream”

Scott Horton on the Levin-McCain report

NYC real estate market upended by Madoff

Obama 3, Bush 0 (I had to turn Bush off — he was simply too far off in la-la land to be taken seriously)

Louise Story on how “On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real” (i.e., what I’ve been saying for years: short-term wankers fucking up everything over the long haul)

Iraqi Prime Minister resigns over Muntadhar ‘Shoe Thrower” al-Zeidi

Honest when drunk 

Facts do tend to feed conspiracies

—.—

Gratuitous swipes:

Latest CT poll on Lieberman

Coleman shuffling the slush

…to the refrigerated shores of Dubai

 Di Rita-ing the first draft of history

Vikings “Love Boat” attorney to rep Laurie Coleman

Obama’s major disrespect for in the bag media

And George Packer shows a contempt for fact-based foreign policy

TBogg breaks out the “clown car” poster

Giordano on Rick Warren

—.—

Gratuitous blog rolling/whoring:

Scroll down to the first match up and vote for Canis Hoopus

The last time I tried to win something online I had Tild make me up a mess of truly disturbing avatars.

Enjoy:

 

 

 

 

Cookie baking tips and other links

The Strib is screening Nick Coleman’s last round of reader comments, the better to keep the drool enabled crowd from peeing on the guest book as Nick gets set to check out. He is checking out, I believe, altho I’m not sure he’s actually said as much. 

Kersten, having zero writing chops, has no options. Nick, however, could always go back to being a reporter. I’ve criticized Coleman in the past (mostly for taking on wingnuts instead of ignoring them like a high profile columnist should), but at least he has the grace and common sense to note today that he only wrote 130 columns this year. Well, I didn’t start this blog until May, and I’ve done 732 posts since then, not including this one.

Nick, I suspect, put in more time per column than I did per post, but I also doubt he put in many days that were longer than mine. He did, however and to his credit, cuss less than I did.

See also:

Lambert on Kersten and the Power Fraulein enablers [easily his best post since leaving The Rake]

Shitting on the steak knives

—§—

Coleman’s up by 365 for now, but after seeing how fast his vote tally climbed as Franken’s challenges were examined, I gotta think the examination of the much larger stack of ballots Norm withheld from consideration will prove more than a bit interesting.

Don’t ask me why, but I think Franken may pull this one out in a nail-biting, Republicans-on-a-blackboard screeching all the way kind of squeaker-a-thon everyone predicted right from the get go.

If the ‘pugs lose, expect the whining to go on for years. Even after they’ve forgotten how much they personally despised Norm, the right will claim this election was stolen. 

Which is OK. The seat was only available because the Bushies assassinated Paul Wellstone and yes, I do believe that. Long after this blog is kaput, historians will be making new discoveries regarding Cheney’s extraordinarily lawless and profoundly anti-American shadow presidency.

More:

A key Supreme Court vote today

FiveThirtyEight says Coleman will regret his court challenge

Demko on the MnSC

Chris Steller on the process

Schmelzer on all of Norm’s & Norm’s friends’ attorneys

More at The UpTake [a great blog I don't link to because I'm not a video guy]

—§—

Justice was raped and left for dead crucified on a barbed wire fence by the so-called Western powers this past decade. Charlieq reports on the final resolution to the murder of a Brazilian electrician by London bobbies.

Expect shoe throwing to be on the upswing. Personally I think Bush’s last days in office should be marked by a steady rain of shoes being thrown over the White House fence. [Some brilliant video clips at the link, btw. Geo from The Matrix is my fave.]

It would be, btw, especially appropriate if some of those shoes came from disinterred Afghan mass graves.

UPDATE: Should have guessed I was late to the notion of more shoes.

—§—

I love Andy Birkey’s reporting, but I think he’s getting sandbagged on the Rick Warren story. The Rev. Warren, the homophobic megachurch dick who held the Saddleback faith forum attended by both McCain and Obama, is giving the official invocation at  Obama’s inauguration.

Yes, that struck me as particularly braindead, but then I gave it a second thought and now all I can think about is just what did Warren have to promise Obama in return for this primetime slot?

Lefties are consistently misunderestimating Obama. Personnel picks are not the equivalent of policy changes, and embracing your enemies is politics at its most Kennedyesque and least Nixonian. If not in the invocation itself, expect Warren to make some statement or concession on gay rights that helps put that issue on the back burner for faith-based heterosexuals. 

GLBTs are upset about Prop Hate, but that was just one battle lost as a bigger war was won. Rick Warren may be getting some limelight, but rest assured that Obama is personally guided more by Rev. Wright than by Pastor Warren. Saddleback’s Warren won’t be Obama’s Billy Graham, not by a long shot. No, think instead of Pope Pius XII’s sock puppet relationship with the boys who later moved to Brazil.

Not sure why, but I strongly suspect Obama owns Warren, and good things will come from this, mainly by way of Warren spearheading a less caustic, less End Times, less looney tunes evangelism.

We could use some of that.

UPDATE: Fellow former Republican John Cole sniffed out a pretty rational explanation for what Obama’s up to, and yes, he’s being marvelously Machiavellian.

—§—

Still trying to figure out your new post-moi blog rotation? Do consider mostem@ilednews.com. Great idea, surprised no one had come up with it before now. They only use the @ in their logo, not their actual URL, but that just goes to show we still haven’t run out of decent .com addresses for new online startups.

—§—

A Drinking Liberally holiday party tonight. A fun group if you’re looking for something to do besides TV tonight.

Me? I’ll be watching TV (you have to pass out in front of something, really, it works out better that way altho I do miss waking up to test patterns, a never to be brought back GUIment from my youth).

I’m surprised I attended DL as long as I did. I’m just not a people person anymore (7,000 clients will do that to you), and find it hard to draw a line between what’s appropriate and what’s entertainment.

But having said that, yes, I was the first person to wear that cheesy Chinese-made Santa suit (only the Chinese would make a Santa suit too small for a 300-lb. American).

XXXmas on dudes and dudettes, and while I won’t be showing up with cookies, here’s a link to how you can bake a better cookie all by yourself.

Linkarrhea

Blogging is a habit, and I seem to have kicked this one. The later in the day it gets, the less I seem to care if I get some links posted or not. 

Still, I’ve got a goddamned stack of them. 

POLITICS

Safavian declines to take the stand

Jane Hamsher on Mrs. Schlossberg

Digby on Mrs. Schlossberg

Ken Silverstein on Mrs. Schlossberg

Al Giordano in defense of Mrs. Schlossberg

Mumia Abu Jamal update

RECOUNT

Brauer covers several recount topics in today’s Daily Glean

OUTRAGES:

Chuck Fucking Schumer

Torturing a man for throwing his shoes at the world’s biggest asshole

Phoenix Woman on how the Pentagon willfully denied benefits to surviving spouses due to “computer glitches”

TBogg on the internet game playing former Deputy Asst. Secretary for the oversight of the Fish & Wildlife Service

Scott Horton on Bush’s war crimes

Phone card companies ripping off customers to the tune of HALF the minutes purchased

dday on how contractors screwed Uncle Sucker in Iraq

ABC busily manufacturing controversy

Cheney, admitting to war crimes on national TV

Apple cancels Christmas

That an inkstained wretch would defend an excruciating hack (stirring shit up after decades of the hard right deliberately undermining political comity in this country isn’t just indefensible, it’s insular and more than a bit stupid)

And Ms. Kersten? If you knew how to report, you wouldn’t be out of a job now would you? And since your departure is a tacit admission that you know nothing about reporting, just how in the fuck did you ever get a coveted slot as a columnist at a major daily newspaper?

More from Lambert.

BUTT UGLY RACIST TURDS

No, it is ENTIRELY about whether or not you get to own another human being, and every other word on the subject is just bullshit meant to distract you from the heinous evil that was the Antebellum South and the emotionally deformed bastards who to this day defend the institution of slavery

—¢—

New header tomorrow, and maybe a post or two.

Juiced

Googling I’ve found that deejay jaydee at metafilter has tried it. JP blogged that it worked for him using boxed wine. (And he inexplicably tagged the post Nina Simone who he didn’t mention but that worked for me anyway.) The Gervais & Vine Wine Club has a Pomegranate-glazed Lamb Loin recipe that features red wine.  Zoë Bakes’ Drunken Pears post moved beyond gustatory experience to something truly exotic (but unfortunately probably not as intoxicating). 

I’ve just discovered the — according to Google — little known secret that pomegranate juice mixed with red wine totally kicks ass. 

1. The fruit sugars increase the drinkability in a very nice, very intense way

2. More drinkable wine = faster drunk

3. Faster drunk BUT energized by the fruit sugars

4. So full antioxidants you’ll be coughing up tumors in no time

5. And yes, this is the crack version of wine, what to do when you’ve outgrown Annie Greensprings edition

More and more I’m coming to think that yes, there is a god, and yes, the ornery sumbitch has a nasty fucking sense of humor. I’m embarking on learning oenology from a beer drinker’s perspective, and no, I don’t think that’s been done before, at least not when marrying an heiress wasn’t involved.

The worst part of this oenification process is that all manner of Euroshit is now exerting a gravitational pull on me. Otoh, that could just be the pomegranate “shucking.” No two ways about it, setting free pomegranate seeds is definitely an erotic activity. If that’s not Euro-dink think, I don’t know what is. 

Still to process: resveratrol and boners. Why is it that what makes women horny makes men philosophical?

Shit. It’s 7:40 and I’m almost out of wine. But that’s OK, I think I may be going to bed early tonight.

[Your results may vary (depends on what you're smoking)]

End times just keep on endin’

From the Washington Post:

It was Wall Street’s version of an inside joke: Take a motley collection of largely unwanted assets, repackage them into a new set of bonds, and name it after the pristine white-sand beaches of an exclusive New Jersey town where Katharine Hepburn once summered. 

 

 No one is laughing now.

The Merrill Lynch bond deal known as Mantoloking has ended up with a different punch line: proof of the frenzied, foolhardy drive for upfront fees that helped bring down the world’s financial markets and trigger the largest federal bailout in history.

Wall Street firms thought they had a surefire way to profit from the booming real estate market without much risk to their companies. They engaged in a kind of financial alchemy, creating a trillion-dollar chain of securities on the back of subprime mortgages and other loans, which were sold to investors in private offerings that no government regulator scrutinized.

With these deals, known as collateralized debt obligations, the world glimpsed the raw power of unchecked financial markets operating full-throttle to the point of self-destruction. The cascading losses on CDO bonds have undermined the solvency of several large banks and obliterated the trust that is the bedrock of all functioning markets. The debacle also has called into question the competence of Wall Street, the independence of bond-rating firms, the prudence of insurers and the foresight of regulators.

Deals like Mantoloking were “the height of lunacy,” says Joshua Rosner, a bond market expert who issued multiple warnings about lax lending standards during the past seven years, earning him status as an early prophet of the credit crisis.

So many of these bonds have become untouchable that they stand in the way of restoring the flow of credit that the global financial system needs to operate and that the economy needs to climb out of recession. Experts say that firm prices must be established for the bonds — no matter how low they may go — so the system can clear itself of these toxic assets.

Not only did no government agency or official try to stop the bond deals as they were selling, but Washington cheered this new market because it expanded homeownership — at least until defaults started piling up.

“Wall Street and Washington acted in concert to provide an artificial sense of a safety net,” said Julian Mann, a Los Angeles-based investment portfolio manager for First Pacific Advisors who looked over many CDO offerings.

Like many others, Mann faults Washington for failing to rein in the subprime market, with its many no-documentation, teaser-rate loans that extended credit to those who couldn’t afford it and invited fraud. He also blames Wall Street for relying on elaborate models that predicted that default rates would be low when common sense screamed otherwise. 

 

There is, of course, nothing new here. Bloggers have been screaming about the bullshit Wall Street’s been peddling since blogging began (Ponzi scams being a bit older than the Internet). Even Z-listers like me who can’t even balance a checkbook saw this one coming.

And this is why I keep saying we are now them, and they are now us. Democrats are the true conservatives, minding the till while the champagne-tanked Republicans double down and order another round. 

You don’t get money for nothing, and now everything is turning into nothing. Mainstream media blogs are quoting Its A Wonderful Life and sadness hangs in the air like a car on black ice sliding into a busy intersection.

Taking the ’00s off to blog and to recover from career counseling was a good idea. It didn’t make me much money, but it certainly kept me from losing money and let me miss out on the current fender bender royale. In the late ’90s I came close to financing a brownstone duplex close to the freeway but it was in a neighborhood that never quite got cleaned up (between University and I-94 on Lexington). A good long-term investment, maybe, but more than likely I would have gotten busted up but good now that things are going south. Assuming I had made it this far, hardly a sure thing.

Things have been going south for working Americans ever since the ’70s when a gross assumption gained currency, a belief that anything done behind a desk was more important than something done with your hands (assuming you weren’t female and typing/answering phones wasn’t part of your job description). 

And now? Now all the testonerone-driven A type personalities who were so full of their manliness they had to play handball over lunch are losing a big chunk of all the loot they never really earned in the first place. Fucking someone over on a deal isn’t really work, you know. And neither is using your Senate gig to enable thievery.

Who’s in good shape right now? People with actual skills, and by skills I mean real skills not esoteric knowledge only applicable in certain settings. Expertise in derivatives isn’t worth much right now, I’m thinking, but neither is the knowledge necessary to keep a huge printing press operating. 

Working on cars? Working on a cars is a good skill. Electricians, plumbers, pipefitters, carpenters, cabinetmakers, welders — the traditional trades are in very good shape. Brokers, dealers, realtors, wheeler dealers and managers, not so much. Even meatcutters are doing better, all Rubashkin nonsense aside.

Information Technology? Good stuff by and large but a bit crowded as more and more businesses learn what consumers have figured out: a more expensive Mac saves you money over the long haul. This weekend’s outage means that since 1990 I’ve spent exactly zero time without a working computer (hey, I was only offline — the computer still worked fine).

Writing is a skilled job, but not so much in demand as working on cars. Resumes would bring in some income but I can’t go back there. No, for me, I just need to follow up my voluntary blog foreclosure by doing what Charlie wrote about in his last post. Writers are translators. We take your words and move them around until they mean the same to your audience as they do to you. But we can’t make people buy in a down market, and brother? This is as down as markets get. [And within "my" industry I'm glad to see that the clutterfucks are finally cleaning up their act a bit while the design geniuses get their due.]

But enough about me. This item was about the death of your savings/pension and how you came out of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush years tied with me over here at Grasshopper Central.

How’s that make you feel? Like life owes you a bunch of drunken stoner parties? Well, having done that, all I can say is, me? I’ve got no regrets. In a world where even Bill Kristol finds himself siding with Detroit, values are being reset and priorities reordered.

·‡·

Oh. Yeah. Wingnuts. Fewer of them in the trades than you’d think, real blue collar life not being terribly supportive of Rushbo’s think tanked piggery.

No, locally almost all the “outed” wingnut bloggers are anything but blue collar. I’d be hard pressed to categorize them further, but let’s just say that them that at one time had money, probably don’t have quite so much of it now.

Now I’m thinking brandy and cigars are the new koolaid.

·‡·

Sam Stark’s weekly review at Harper’s reads like it’s 1969 and our cities are burning while a war rages in a far off country.

Note to self: buy some fire insurance.

·‡·

Why is it that when push comes to shove, men are almost always the biggest cunts?

·‡·

There’s a cute running gag in Nixon Frost about Italian shoes being for men who are light in the loafers but the reality is that the only guy in the movie who ever gets laid is the one wearing the Italian shoes.

·‡·

End Times for:

The bullies, eavesdroppers [more] and torturers

Open societies

Corrupt prosecutors

Katherine Kersten [more, still more, more yet]

Nazis (I hope)

Electroshock (again, I hope)

Karl Rove

Wingnut wankery 

Sleazeball Bushies

·‡·

Recount:

MnIndy on Norman’s home remodeling

Ann Coulter 

Norm says STOP!

Oops — Coleman “not ready”

Voter intent

Do read that last one. More and more it’s looking like Al might win this one if only because Norm is acting exactly like a loser acts. Too many Coleman challenges and it smells like they’re bogus as all hell (again, these are the people who were challenging any ballot showing votes for McCain-Palin and Al Franken).

But either way our new Senator obviously does not enjoy the confidence of most Minnesotans. 

Thank you DFL because without your fucked up endorsement system, this most likely would have never happened.